In this context, doubt is actually the valuable thing, the thing we want to seize. But encountering freshness and agency in this way, Arendt wrote, required someone to hold their ground “between the clashing waves of past and future.” Otherwise, you’d get flattened by certainty: The past would crush you with tradition, and the future would crush you with determinism. Hence the importance and fragility of the “gap” (another term for “non-time”) in the title of Arendt’s preface, “The Gap between Past and Future.”
